Image by Simone Ramella, license CC BY 2.0.
Julien Assange, whose WikiLeaks provided a platform for whistleblowers, has reached a deal with U.S. authorities, making him a free man. Journalists, however, fear precedent.
WikiLeaks founder Julien Assange is a familiar name to anyone interested in the phenomenon of whistleblowing. In 2010, he published on WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of secret documents and recordings about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, revealing that the U.S. military did not always act “cleanly” and carefully there. For example, he brought out information provided to him by Chelsea Manning, an intelligence analyst in the U.S. military, who has since been sentenced to 35 years in prison herself. Mannings was released in 2017 after a presidential pardon from Obama. Assange, who has Australian citizenship, was prosecuted in the United States, and he also faced a long prison sentence. That is why he had initially fled into the Ecuadorian embassy in London. After spending seven years there, he came out, whereupon he was arrested by British police and held in Belmarsh prison. He has appealed his extradition by the British to the US several times. Finally, then, he has now reached an agreement with U.S. authorities.
On Wednesday, the judge on the island of Saipan, a small U.S. island in the Pacific Ocean, sentenced Assange to five years in prison and immediately, as had been agreed between the prosecutor and Assange, set off that sentence against the five years in Britain’s Belmarsh prison. This allowed Assange to return to his native Australia the same day as a free man. He did have to admit guilt for that.
Many journalists were not too happy about this deal. It was already known from the past that whoever discloses U.S. state secrets can expect a very stiff punishment. Now the person publishing the information has also been condemned. This may have set a precedent for future U.S. administrations seeking to curb press freedom. And possibly other countries will be inspired by the American approach.
For Assange, this ends years of incarceration and uncertainty. He immediately flew on to Australia to be reunited with his family. He does still plan to apply for a pardon.
